Editor’s Letter

Benjamin Ramm

Stalin appears to Putin in
a dream. The President is weighed down by concerns about the
state of the nation, and asks Stalin: “What should I do about the economy? Crime
is high, and unemployment…”Stalin, without pausing for thought, responds: “Round up and
shoot every male between the age of 21 and 30, and then paint the inside
of the Kremlin blue”.
“Why blue?”, Putin asks.
Stalin: “I had a feeling you’d only query the second part...”

RUSSIAN humour maintains a deserved reputation for communicating unvarnished
truths with a wry stoicism, even if things in Vladimir Putin’s
Russia aren’t quite as bad as that. This issue of The
Liberal is devoted to exploring Russia in the age of Putin, with a view to
the challenges facing her citizens and her government in the decade
ahead. It also looks back to mark the 90th anniversary of the Revolutions
of 1917, which continue to stimulate and inform public debate about
the future of the country.

In truth, the failed uprisings of 1905 are probably a more insightful
marker with which to consider the nature of Putin’s administration.
In the wake of the capitalist free-for-all of the Yeltsin period, it
has been tempting to view the President’s manoeverings in purely
egocentric terms, as Anna Politkovskaya tended to (political power
as “a means for the achievement and retention of personal power,
no more than that...L’Etat, c’est Putin”); yet the
Kremlin’s ‘managed democracy’ is very much a development
of the Tsarist political tradition, more top-down and patriarchal than
hands-on and party-lead. This is evidenced at least in part by the
President’s overtures to the Russian Orthodox Church and its ‘spiritual
leader’ Patriarch Alexei II. The ultra-conservative institution – with
its triad of Pravoslaviye, Samoderzhaviye, Narodnost (Orthodoxy, Autocracy,
Nationality) – shares many of the Kremlin’s concerns about
sovereignty and the role of the state in the modern democratic era.
At a ceremony attended by leading cabinet members last Spring, the
Tenth World Council of Russian People adopted a Declaration of Human
Dignity and Rights, a document overtly critiquing a secular understanding
of human rights as being incompatible with the moral and ethical approaches
of Orthodoxy. Too close an adherence to this set of values would, Alexei
remarked, likely lead to the “revival of neo-paganism”;
what ‘Mother Russia’ required was the steady hand of a
benevolant authoritarian.

While the President’s manouevers may be best understood in realpolitik terms, Russia finds itself in a position comparable to that of the
other major (in all but name) ex-Communist power, China. Putin, like
Deng Xiaoping before him, believes that the nation-state need not be
weakened, as it was under his predecessor, by embracing capitalism;
and that there need be no longer a proverbial tension between Moscow
and St. Petersburg, Russia ‘window to the West’: rather,
capitalism can be the engine for the rehabilitation of ‘Greater
Russia’, with its energy-lead influence and ‘soft power’ in
blizhneye zarubezhiye (‘the near abroad’). If anything,
the great achievement of Moscow and Beijing is to seem like they have,
in the words of Perry Anderson, “no ideology of [their] own” – a
classical Marxist mistake, born of the belief that capitalism must
always be the ends, and never the means. Indeed, Anderson has argued
that the Kremlin’s recent “rages” over oil and gas
in the former Soviet states are “neurotic, not psychotic symptoms”;
but Russian nationalism was arguably never psychotic in a 20th-century
sense, and despite Putin’s toleration of growing anti-immigrant
sentiment – whipped up by the unfortunately-titled Liberal Democratic
Party, and Rodina (‘Motherland’) – the President
is wary of allowing forces outside of the Kremlin dictate events on
the ground (Rodina was banned from taking part in Moscow’s municipal
elections last year).

This Sino-Russian vision found expression in 2005 with the ‘Joint
Statement of the PRC and Russian Federation Regarding the International
Order of the 21st Century’. The document places an emphasis on
the importance of “international law and…of mutual respect
for each other’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, mutual
non-aggression [and] non-interference in each other’s internal
affairs”, with the latter point being mentioned, almost word-for-word,
on four different occasions. One must wonder how it has come to this:
that, for all the failures of American foreign policy, it is possible
for two of the nations responsible for the greatest violations of human
rights to proclaim their faith in (the increasingly nebulous notion
of) ‘international law’. Certainly, the strategic coalitions
made at the the Shanghai Cooperation Summit, in which this relationship
finds its economic voice, are no less worrying; Pakistan, and Iran
have both applied for full membership since receiving observer status
at the 2005 event. Fifty years after the Treaty of Rome, these alliances
provide a direct challenge to the political and ideological project
of the EU, which must discover a new energy and focus to offer a counterbalance
to the excesses of East and West.

The so-called ‘East Asian Bargain’ – the implicit
agreement between the rapidly-expanding middle classes and the governing
elite (that the former will get rich but, in return, stay out of the
political sphere) – is ever more evident in both these countries.
Russia in 2007 is a state in which the secret service, or FSB, is more
powerful than their KGB predecessors; in which the “enemies of
the Russian regime” may be legally murdered abroad; where it
is more dangerous to practise journalism than in Sudan or Zimbabwe;
where property rights are purposely kept ambiguous to allow for government
(re-)appropriation; where the extremely centralised state cedes no
power to the regions, and bars democratic election for 89 state governors,
as well as the mayors of Moscow and St. Petersburg; where there is
no longer a minimum vote turnout in elections or a majoritarian system
that allows independent candidates to stand, and one cannot vote against
all the candidates; where Yabloko, the foremost liberal party, enjoying
the wide support of up to 20% of St. Petersburg’s electorate,
was removed from the ballot under the pretext that the lists containing
voters’ names for party registration included too many forged
signatures (a decision made yet more injurious by the fact that the
party was later informed it could in fact field candidates for a mammoth
deposit of 90 million roubles, or £1.8 million). The political
project of liberalism has never been more pressing that it is in Russia
today.

“The only thing politics and poetry have in common”, Joseph
Brodsky once remarked, “is the letter ‘p’ and the
letter ‘o’”. In 1939, one of Brodsky’s great
influences, WH Auden, penned a notebook prose piece entitled ‘The
Prolific and the Devourer’ (“the Artist and the Politician”),
dedicated to exploring the distinct nature of these temperaments. At
no point did either poet, however, suggest that this seperateness negated
the political project, and both were committed to cultivating a more
pallatable politics and engaging polis (“There are worse crimes
than burning books”, Brodsky wrote. “One of them is not
reading them”). Since the heady days of perestroika, with its
flourishing of creative and intellectual discourses, when 30,000 Russians
filled a stadium to listen to Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s poetry, the
public sphere has found itself increasingly moulded by the preferences
of capitalist culture. Consumption has increased by a staggering two
and a half times in the last six years, and with it those who experience
something of the societal alienation familiar to highly industrialised
societies (of America, the poet Adrienne Rich wrote: “this isn’t
a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here, / our country
moving closer to its own truth and dread, / its own ways of making
people disappear”). The liberal project must devote itself to
rehabilitating the public sphere, a Romantic commiment with a rich
tradition in Russia, from the Golden Age contemporaries of Shelley
and Byron – Pushkin and Lermontov (“No, I’m not Byron;
I am, yet, / Another choice for the sacred dole, / Like him – a
persecuted soul, / But only of the Russian set”) – to their
Silver Age adherents (p.44). And it is in this light that we may better
understand the ‘In Place of a Preface’ from Akhmatova’s
famous ‘Reqiuem’ – as being not only an affirmation
of poetry per se, but of an unwillingness to abandon the public sphere
to that ‘politics’, to those ways of making people disappear:

During the awful days of the Yezhov Terror, I spent seventeen
months waiting in the visitors’ prison queues in Leningrad. One day,
someone ‘identified’ me. Then a woman standing behind me
in the line, who of course had never heard my name, awoke from the
torpor typical of all of us there, and asked me, whispering into my
ear (all spoke only in a whisper there):“And can you describe this?”And I answered:“Yes, I can”.